Scrutable Houses

Scrutable Houses is an original collection of poems that attempts to inspect critically and with care the literal and figurative houses of our human dwelling. The title echoes yet departs from Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina," and scrutability is linked to questions of identity---finding our place in our families, in the world, in ourselves, in art. The first section invokes the palette with a sequence that sketches a partial history of the color blue, emphasizing the body of color, dyes and pigments, the raw materials for art. "Houses" of art recur throughout in theme and in ekphrastic poems, which point to the precarious intersections between history and aesthetics. Never far from these museums are the more private homes of personal muses and memories. Throughout the collection, poems turn to various poetic forms and meters, houses that enable a vision of making, unmaking and remaking even more habitable worlds.